Outsourcing is the task of getting other people to do things you can’t don’t do.
We do it all the time: most people don’t grow their own food, build their own houses or do much to make near enough anything they use.
Adam Smith called it division of labour and it’s getting more and more common.
You’re already using outsourcing in your internet marketing: domain names, hosting, etc. are almost always outsourced.
But here we’re going to talk about a few of the other things you can get other people to do.
Articles
Because the web positively thrives on content – mainly written content – articles are one of the first things people outsource.
Partly because for a lot of people, it’s not something they enjoy.
I’ve used various companies to write articles for me over the years.
Get Articles Done are good: you just give them your keywords and maybe a bit of direction (if you’re being fussy) and you get good quality articles back.
They have a team of writers and they also control the whole process so you don’t normally have to proof read them.
iWriter is a more d-i-y process: you have to be more precise about what you want and you have to proof read the articles before you accept them.
When I use them, I specify what I want:
For me, that gets good results, even at their cheapest level. I accept around 75% of the articles that get written for me and reject about a quarter for English that would be too difficult to tidy up.
I accept that I’m going to have to spend a few minutes editing as the price to pay for getting cheap – and often surprisingly good – articles written in a very short time.
That’s the other plus of iWriter: turnaround time is super fast, usually measured in hours.
Graphics
As you may well notice as you look around this site, I don’t use many graphics.
I occasionally get free images from Stock Exchange.
But for anything more complicated, I’ll either use Fiverr or Freelancer.
Whichever site you choose for graphics, it pays to check out the portfolio of the person you’re thinking about using.
Images are very personal things and one person’s idea of a good graphic is another person’s idea of a bad graphic.
For instance, I like Dali’s paintings but abstract art leaves me cold.
So you’ll need to decide what you like and don’t like.
Graphics people know this and are used to showing you their portfolio.
When you find one whose work you like, you need to give them a “brief” or specification.
Don’t worry about getting too detailed – you’ll almost certainly need to specify the size of the image you want, what you want on it, etc.
Chances are that you’ll also be offered a choice of formats for the final delivery.
If you’re able to get more than one format included in the price, that’s good. I got a high resolution image for one Fiverr gig recently.
jpg is regularly used on the web and is well suited to photos. It comes in different compression levels which affect clarity and the physical size in bytes
gif used to be the standard for simple images but there have been some licensing problems a while ago which means it’s not used as much
png has taken over from gif and is widely used, even when a jpg might be slightly smaller, because it is lossless and therefore keeps the image data intact
tiff is often used by printers
psd is favoured by people using program’s like Adobe’s Photoshop
Vector image formats are worthwhile if you’re ever likely to blow an image up to a very big size such as a billboard poster. They can also be fun to manipulate – years ago (well before Windows came out) I used them to cut out vinyl graphics and I still miss the flexibility to squash and stretch fonts at will
The general rule with graphics is go for the most popular formats at the biggest resolution you can get.
It’s much easier for a computer to remove information than guess missing data – interpolation in technical terms.
Website design
This is often a hybrid – graphic design and coding combined.
As such, that’s an awkward skill set to find. Most graphics designers don’t really like writing the code to make their design work in practice. And a lot of coders are even more graphically challenged than I am.
So choosing a supplier with a team that splits the work can be a good idea but can work out expensive.
Another option is to buy a ready-built “theme” (look and feel) for your site.
Places like Theme Forest have an abundance of these at reasonable prices.
Don’t worry too much about your site looking the same as a lot of other people’s sites.
Unless you’re in the same market, attracting exactly the same visitors, it’s unlikely anyone will notice.
I know that from experience – people have asked me where I got the design done for this site and are surprised when I tell them it’s the WordPress Twenty Twelve theme – the default option in WordPress when I installed the site.
Adding extra’s to WordPress
WordPress is incredibly flexible.
In the years I’ve been using it, I’ve almost always been able to find a free plugin that will do what I want.
To date, there have only been two instances where that hasn’t been the case:
I wanted the option to delay showing part of the page for a delayed “buy” button. I paid some money and got that developed. As I write, the coder is just tweaking it so that I can sell it.
A project I’m working on wants to allow users to upload images and we want to automatically filter non-PG images. I’ve not found a free or paid plugin to do that and from what I’ve read it’s likely to be a fraught process as computers aren’t very good at working out what’s in an image.
But that’s it.
If you can’t find something free, CodeCanyon is the place to look.
If it exists for WordPress (or Joomla, Drupal, Magento or lots of other things), there’s a very high chance it will be there.
Outsourcing other things
There’s very little that can’t be outsourced.
Sites like Freelancer give you lots of options.
You need to be specific about what you want.
And – with that site – you need to nail down things as much as possible before accepting bids.
That took me a while to work out – I was used to using Rentacoder and vWorker before they got bought by Freelancer – and the coders tend to put in a bid first, think about it later.
Which means you need to quiz them in the chat window to make sure that they understand what they’ve bid on.
You also need to check that the price they bid is the price they want to charge – a few (fortunately only a few) seem to view the bid as a starting price but don’t want to charge that in real life.
It’s a learning curve and it can be frustrating at times.
Time differences take a bit of getting used to – quite a few of the workers are in India which is 4.5 hours different from the UK and a lot bigger difference from America.
Language differences can also be awkward – there’s a good level of English used but various meanings of words can make conversations interesting at times.
If it’s a critical project – and if my patience levels are high – I’ll choose two different coders to work on the same project.
Both get paid and I choose the best version.
And it’s usually still cheaper than hiring someone locally. Which is a scary thought if you’re thinking of working on a freelance site.
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